7D ISO 12800, GH2 ISO 12800, GH1 ISO 3200

May 29, 2011

What this short video is about is taking all three cameras to the extreme. Is this a particularly useful test? Probably not. But there are always a few people out there that demand the best high ISO performance and will use whatever it takes to capture the shot.

To set this up, we have to keep in mind that the Panasonic cameras will only go to their max ISO settings when in shutter priority mode with an electronic lens. This does not allow us to use the same lens on both brands of cameras, which is typically a place we don’t want to go with these types of tests. Also, there is no specified ISO on the screen while shooting in shutter priority with Ev set to +3, so we have to test against stills in order to ascertain the ISO the camera is shooting at.

Relative ISO. The GH1 at ISO 3200 is equivalent to the GH2 and 7D at around ISO 6400. You can see in this test it has quite a bit less chroma noise just from being at half the ISO of the other two cameras.

Here’s a test from last week with just the gh2 and the 7d – unfortunately again this is less comparable as one lens is f1.7 and the other f2.0